The invention relates to systems and methods for biometric authentication, and in particular to systems and methods wherein such computations are carried out concurrently on multiple machines.
Biometric data, such as facial features, fingerprints, voice features, and handwritten signatures, among others, may be used to authenticate a user for applications such as access control and non-repudiation, among others. Typically, biometric data is uniquely associated to an individual, so such data may be used to verify the identity of the person requesting access to some protected resource. In an exemplary biometric authentication application, to get access to a restricted area of a building, a person may be asked to provide biometric data, e.g., to allow his/her face to be analyzed by an image processing device, or to allow a scanner to collect his/her fingerprint. After verifying the identity of the person, the authentication system may grant the person access to the restricted area. In another example, a user requesting access to a bank account may be asked to input a handwritten signature into a reader. A biometric authentication system may then determine whether the respective signature is associated with an authorized user of the respective bank account, and if so, the system may allow the user to access the bank account.
Common biometric authentication systems compare data collected from a user requesting authentication to a reference record, also known as a template, stored for the respective user. The comparison typically employs pattern recognition and/or machine learning algorithms, such as neural networks, to determine a degree of similarity between the user data and the reference data. Such operations may be particularly computationally intensive.
There is a considerable interest in developing methods and systems capable of performing biometric authentication with low response times, for instance, methods and systems that perform authentication service concurrently, for numerous clients providing a variety of biometric data.